Political Research Seminar (395-0-23)

Topic

Asian Americans, Latinos, and Black Protest

Instructors

Julianne Lee Merseth Cook
847/467-0276

Meeting Info

Lunt Hall 103: Tues 1:00PM - 3:50PM

Overview of class

This course explores the promises and pitfalls of cross-racial political solidarity in the contemporary United States by examining the response of Asian American and Latino communities to Black protest. We begin by studying the construction of racial(ized) groups, focusing on theories of racialization and racial paradigms beyond the black-white binary, and the formation of racial/panethnic categories (e.g., Black/African American, Latino/Hispanic, Asian American/AAPI). We then explore histories of solidarity and political coalition-building across Asian, Latino, and Black communities in the U.S. Having established this, we turn our attention to the foundations of anti-Blackness and anti-Black racism in Asian American and Latino communities, employing a comparative-relational lens to further illuminate the barriers to cross-racial coalitions, both before and after the racial uprisings in response to the police killings of Ahmaud Arbery, Breonna Taylor, and George Floyd in 2020. Lastly, we study how Asian and Latino communities in the U.S. responded to those uprisings over months of sustained Black protest, bringing to bear the foundations and context we have studied to understand and engage in a critical and comparative analysis. Throughout the course we attend to the intersections of race with other identities such as ethnic/national origin, nativity, citizenship status, legal status, class, age, gender, sexuality, and religion.

Class Attributes

Advanced Expression